I had my brain MRI this morning. Which was nice and uneventful since I woke up and took anti-anxiety meds to avoid claustrophobia, so I was half asleep. This meant I somehow managed not to wiggle everywhere and a change in my tunes had me zonked out. I even managed not to cough with this weird chest bug I got in Philly (that I would totally appreciate going away!).
After the appointment my dad and I went to a diner and got some food. I got a side of fruit. I am on a fruit kick. I don’t know if it is my chemo mouth or a sweet tooth, but I have been chowing down on fruit lately (there are worse things to be craving I am sure).
I took a nap for a couple of hours. Getting up that early does not agree with my body, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
We went back to the hospital for my appointment and my neurological oncologist (I get confused on who is what?!) who does radiation, was worried I had seen the report. I told her I hadn’t. She explained that my report read very concerning, spots growing everywhere. New ones there, old ones gone and several little dots with growth (if you could read it and look at all of the spots in my brain, I have over 10 tumors). She explained that she isn’t 100% convinced that they are ALL metastatic disease, and that turning my head could create the measurement difference they were seeing – thus it just wasn’t enough to panic at and they don’t know what to attack based on this report.
My new left frontal lobe tumor hadn’t really done much. Maybe grew a millimeter (I’ll have to see when I get the report). Considering my active tumors were growing 3 mm in a within a week last time, 1 mm in a month and a half is not super bad comparatively.
If my liver wasn’t exciting enough, here is my brain! Little white spots are the areas of concern.
She wanted to take my case to the tumor board (sr. oncologists that work in that area) for review and to see if she missed anything. Otherwise she wants to wait 2 months to scan, review and decide if anything needed attention.
Otherwise we wait 2 months and see what these guys do. If a bunch grow and I somehow have to get whole brain radiation, we look at that then. The preference is that we just knock off a few at a time that are worth SRS when they are worth SRS (it seems like they prefer to do SRS on ones they have identified as actively growing tumors).
It does mean I have another clearly unstable MRI report for anyone in study land if I were to go looking for a study (growth EVERYWHERE!), but for now, stable-ish seems to be the land I live in. I have a bunch of little ticking timebombs in my brain and my body, but as long as they keep ticking and not growing too much – we are good. So, for now, we are in a standoff in my brain. I am ok with this, it could be much worse (and a hope for NED up there would be an insane stretch of awesome I can’t grasp right now).
So my body and my brain aren’t stable, but their not way outside of stable. They are stable-ish.
